We’re down in the Twin Cities for the Minnesota Newspaper Association annual convention with three days of meetings, seminars, speeches and awards.
The Ely Echo will take home a good haul of awards, a nice reward for all the hours worked to put out a newspaper 52 weeks a year.
But the convention attendance is down significantly from last year and tremendously for a decade ago. We don’t even want to talk about what it was like 40 years ago. So many newspapers back then are no longer with us today.
The internet giants of Google and Facebook aren’t always directly mentioned but they are the digital thieves who have siphoned away billions in revenue that used to go to newspapers. That loss of revenue directly equates to a loss of newspapers. Yet the industry survives.
There are many familiar faces here and we recount conventions in the 1980s. There are generational owners and plenty of new faces. No matter the amount of gray hair, the determination to serve their communities with a reliable news product is as strong as ever.
We will talk with others who have the same experiences and also have some new ideas we may try back in our hometown.
Capturing advertising dollars is high on the list but we also know consumer dollars are being spent more and more at Amazon. That is killing small town businesses and correspondingly, small town newspapers.
The convention is a break from the weekly grind and there’s food for the soul here. And for many, there’s hope there’s a way to feed the bottom line and not end up in the food line.
